Now That's What I Call New Pop!

10. Orange Juice: "Blue Boy"Released: August 1980Chart peak: UK N/A, U.S. N/AAnd then they came, bounding from the north, with bouncy fake disco and a love of the Velvets that seemingly treated their lyrics as a foreign language. Edwyn Collins sounded like a forty-year-old doing "Most Happy Fella" at a Glasgow dinner theater and looked like a twelve-year-old in his church clothes. This, their second single, sold 20,000 copies, not half what it should have. Orange Juice, for better or worse, perfected the template of alienated-and-loving-it indie boy success-- all bad hair, broken hearts, and big grins. ("Falling & Laughing" as their first single put it.) Put this between Nelly's "Ride Wit Me" and the Big Tymers' "Oh Yeah" on your next mixtape for the ebullience hat trick. Amazingly it took Collins 14 years to score an honest-to-goodness pop hit.

09. Japan: "Ghosts"Released: March 1982Chart peak: UK #5, U.S. N/AJapan were lost boys when punk broke, heavily pancaked glam throwbacks who perhaps realized they had to wait for the pendulum to swing back to pomp. By the time it had, they had also done the impossible and reinvented themselves as artists, with a lowercase "a," as opposed to most of the era's Artistes. "Ghosts" is probably the most amazing top 10 single in this list. David Sylvian sings like an over-polite concierge. There is no rhythm track, barely any hint of "music," just flickers of electronics like dying embers. Surely the only band to influence both Goldie and David Gray.

08. The Art of Noise: "Beat Box"Released: March 1984Chart peak: UK #51, U.S. #1 (Dance Music/Club Play)Built on a drum loop from when producer Trevor Horn was briefly aligned with Yes (surely the antithesis of new pop), "Beat Box" is, in essence, the first hip-hop record to use a sampled breakbeat. A few years before cheap samplers found their way into the hands of people like Marley Marl, Horn's exorbitantly priced Fairlight CMI Series II made a bunch of middle-aged white British dudes the hottest thing in Black American pop. Everything is rendered as a stab, from voices to horns to unidentifiable blurts of noise. It's influence on people like Mantronix and the Latin Rascals is undeniable. Amazingly, this can still be heard on "classic r&b" stations. I heard it two Christmases ago while driving my mother home, sandwiched between Average White Band and Rick James, sounding as alien and awesome as ever.

07. New Order: "Blue Monday"Released: March 1983Chart peak: UK #9, U.S. #1 (Dance Music/Club Play)And speaking of British dance records that reinvented the wheel: Do I even need to talk about this? Still played, in clubs, to this day. Probably somewhere right now. It's like fucking "Gilligan's Island". That staccato bass drum at the beginning will send any crowd into hysterics. "It takes ecstasy to make a white man dance," New Order drummer Stephen Morris has said. But Jesus, you'd never know it.

06. The Specials: "Ghost Town"Released: June 1981Chart peak: UK #1, U.S. N/A2-Tone wasn't exactly new pop. For one thing it was brazenly throwback, flying in the face of new pop's almost maniacal focus on the present. For another, it felt much closer to punk, all choppy, straight-ahead rhythms and anti-fascist politics. But coming at roughly the same time as Metal Box, the Specials and the other bands on 2-Tone were obviously aiming their bouncy and, well, fun music at the charts.

Two years later they spent three weeks at number one with their masterpiece, a not very pop record in the classical sense, and yet once you hear it, its appeal is immediately obvious. Over a cartoon version (and I don't remotely mean that as an insult) of dub dread, the band laments the creeping discontent following Thatcher's election, as contemporaneous riots raged over the UK. The B-sides are very nearly as good. Lynval Golding's "Why?" finds him pleading for racial tolerance even as he was beaten into the intensive care unit by racist skins as the single hit number one. From his hospital bed, he was still calling for peace. Terry Hall's "Friday Night & Saturday Morning" captures the gentle, heartbreaking futility of the single person's club hopping so effortlessly that even that Nouvelle Vague bullshit from this year couldn't tarnish it.

05. The Human League: "Don't You Want Me"Released: December 1981Chart peak: UK #1, U.S. #1Though perhaps now inextricable from nostalgia and kitsch, this remains one of the greatest pop singles ever made. It has everything one could possibly want: strikingly modernist production that's moved back from camp to classic, Abba-ready harmonies, glamour mixed up with the utterly mundane, and a former experimental collective briefly becoming the world's biggest pop band with only the singer and projectionist (!) remaining from the original line-up. The fact that it was the UK Christmas #1 is just gravy.

04. Frankie Goes To Hollywood: "Two Tribes"Released: June 1984Chart peak: UK #1, U.S. #43The flipside to all this tanned hedonism in early 80s British pop was "apocalypse rock." I'm barely old enough to remember the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation myself, though just old enough to have been traumatized by it, like an eight year old trying to get his head around the concept of "cancer." The epitome of apocalypse rock is, artistically if not commercially, the Young Marble Giants' "Final Day". Over a hissing drum machine and pokey, turtle-shy bass, Alison Stratton mewls about the final shrug as the "nation of shopkeepers" is vaporized in an instant. Frankie Goes To Hollywood's drum machines and bass didn't hiss or hide. They thundered like disco orchestrated by Wagner. They were certainly "against" nuclear war. But they sure did make it sound excited, all those phallic warheads messily exploding.

03. Scritt Politti: "The 'Sweetest' Girl"Released: August 1981Chart peak: UK N/A, U.S. N/ABy now, with the release of the Early comp, anyone who wants to can hear those first Scritti Politti singles that were little more than rumor pre-mp3. The genius stroke of that collection was including "The 'Sweetest' Girl"/"Lions After Slumber" single. This, the first "pop" Scritti record, still sounds shocking against those formative, sketchy post-punk singles. Green Gartside embraces the femininity of his voice, and swathes his lover's discourse ("politics is prior to the vagaries of science" love, love me do) in a nimbus of pop-reggae phasing. The whole thing sways like trees seen across a parking lot on a July day. It's still not exactly "pop," but it's a step towards it. And, if new pop taught us anything, it's that the journey can be far more interesting than the ignominious arrival.

02. Associates: "Party Fears Two"Released: February 1982Chart peak: UK #9, U.S. N/ANo new pop band stretched the definition of "pop" further. And no new pop band's success was ever so unexpected or deserved at the same time. At a time when drama was increasingly being delivered from behind a mascara'd wink, The Associates amped up everything fey and hysterical in pop culture (disco, Bowie, Roxy, Las Vegas show tunes) to an uncomfortable degree. Billy Mackenzie sounded, as one writer said, like a tranny in a wind tunnel. The production-- imagine Temptations producer Norman Whitfield's "psychedelic soul" being applied to Bowie's teutonic chic-- goes multi-track crazy, massing Mackenzie's harmonies into the queerest bunch of choirboys to ever trouble a chart. This is fruity psychedelia shoehorned into a new romantic straightjacket.

01. ABC: "All of My Heart"Released: September 1982Chart peak: UK #5, U.S. N/AIn the end, what else could it be? ABC's slickest and most gorgeous single, and yet also possibly their most bitter. ("No I won't be told/ There's a crock of gold/ At the end of the rainbow." "Skip the hearts and flowers/ Skip the ivory towers.") Martin Fry sketches the story of a friendship that wants-- no, Needs-- to be more but can never be. "No happy ever after/ Now we're friends." He alternates between open hearted and suspicious, warm and resentful with the turn of a phrase. This is the main tension driving of all of ABC's best work, which is to say The Lexicon of Love and its singles: Fry the wounded romantic vs. Fry the detached observer of human folly.

The very real heartbreak animating the album-- Fry had been unceremoniously dumped before recording began-- would have been as naked as an emo record if not tempered by his ironist's artifice. Horn buffets Fry in a down of strings and woodwinds, rising in pitch as he delivers his final summation ("the kindest cut's the cruelest part") before everything drops out as he mewls the title. The outro-- a swirl of soundtrack strings, plucked bass, and cascading piano-- is the most purely beautiful music of the era. Sure, it's cheesy, gaudy, overblown. Who ever said cheesy, beautiful, profound, and cynical couldn't coexist in one song? Hell, it's all I really want from music.